“A single man sometimes frightened a whole population.” – Brigand Life in Italy, vol. 1 (1865) by Count Alberto Maffei di Boglio. The origins of Ciro Annicchiarico (“Don Ciro”) are obscure, but most authors agree that his criminal career started with a blood feud, possibly in the Mezzogiorno village of Francavilla. Don Ciro, then a priest…
Theatre Review: Awake and Asleep
THEATRE REVIEW: AWAKE AND ASLEEP The Magic, Language, and Society initiative is a new collaboration between The University of Surrey and Treadwell’s Bookshop. In a bid to make certain esoteric aspects of the humanities more accessible to wider audiences, the programme will run events at Treadwell’s, a nucleus of London’s contemporary magical scene. The inaugural…
The Mermaids of Congo
Images of mermaids first appeared in European bestiaries in the early Middle Ages. At the time, firsthand encounters with the legendary creatures were rare. Nevertheless, mythographers and chroniclers, no doubt inspired by Greco-Roman art, described merfolk as capricious water spirits that were usually up to no good. Like aerial demons, they were capable of copulation,…
Paracelsus the Rebel
ODD TRUTHS: PARACELSUS THE REBEL The nineteenth-century occultist Eliphas Levi praised Paracelsus as a kind of crazy wisdom guru. He pictured the Swiss doctor and alchemist as a frequently drunk “maniac”, who had been more powerful than the most “celebrated magnetists”. Levi’s views were typical of the romanticism of his era, but similar sentiments were…
Fantast in Focus: Sasha Chaitow
FANTAST IN FOCUS: SASHA CHAITOW In a way, Sasha Chaitow is following in the footsteps of the earliest philosophers. Many of them spent their lives in the sun-kissed Greek islands as educators and advisers, developing their theories in the presence of cypress trees and Homer’s famous “wine-dark” sea. Sasha however, has developed a more cosmopolitan…
Zora the Explorer
Earlier this year, National Geographic reported that a team of archaeologists had discovered a legendary city in the remote La Mosquitia Valley of Honduras. The expedition’s ethnobotanist is quoted as saying that the area is “the most undisturbed rain forest in Central America”. Amazingly the ruins—which are still being excavated—point to the existence of a…
The Wizard of Pennsylvania
ODD TRUTHS: THE WIZARD OF PENNSYLVANIA In his poem The Pennsylvania Pilgrim, John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) refers to a “weird” and wizard-like recluse who haunts the Wissahickon woodland: The inspiration for this romantic woodsman-magus was none other than Johannes Kelpius, a Transylvanian theologian and mystic who emigrated from Europe to Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1694 to establish a rural utopian community…
Fantast in Focus: Moon Ribas
FANTAST IN FOCUS: MOON RIBAS Sir Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that any “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. His statement may ring true in the work of Spanish artist Moon Ribas. In a way, Moon’s art is ‘techno-magical’. She creatively utilises cutting-edge gadgetry to explore the latent possibilities of the human senses. Moon is also…
Fantast in Focus: Aliya Whiteley
FANTAST IN FOCUS: ALIYA WHITELEY Aliya Whiteley is an author and librarian. Her new novella from Unsung Stories, The Arrival of the Missives, has just been released and is already making waves. Like her previous novel The Beauty (published in 2014), The Arrival of the Missives is a work of speculative, mind-bending fiction. It’s a seemingly ordinary…
Fantast in Focus: Barry McGlashan
FANTAST IN FOCUS: BARRY MCGLASHAN Reminiscent of the work of Caspar David Friedrich and Frederic Edwin Church, Barry McGlashan’s art is distinguished by its sublimity and profundity. Although Barry was born in Scotland, a country of naturally poetic landforms and history, his paintings have a transcendental quality to them. Often tinted with oneiric colours, they evoke…